The Golden-Haired Wolf of Winterfell
by sunshine and lollipops
Summary: Back story: Add a set of twins to the Lannister family tree - Amaria and Elisabetta. Elisabetta is a cold, cold woman and her father's favorite assassin. Amaria was married to Benjen Stark briefly. She died giving birth to Beckah Stark (the Golden-Haired Wolf of Winterfell). These will be quick one shots for now. Let's see where it all goes, shall we?
1. Chapter 1

_**Author's Note: Any and all characters/places/situations familiar to the reader have been shamelessly borrowed from George R.R. Martin and the boys who head up the TV adaptation. Elisabetta Lannister and Beckah Stark are my own creation. Thanks for reading! :)**_

_**I.**_

Elisabetta Lannister arrived late to Winterfell. The invitation had been extended to Casterly Rock as a formality and a courtesy. After all, the Starks were entertaining the majority of the Lannister household tonight. Lord Tywin and his youngest daughter were not expected to appear. But Elisabetta rarely did what was expected of her.

Her twin sister, Amaria, had been the same although less original in her streak of rebellion—marrying a Northern man against the family's wishes, bearing his child, and then dying without a thought to the consequences of any of it. But it was all saccharine nonsense. Like two sides of a coin, one light and one shadowed, Elisabetta's spirit ran a little cooler, a little darker than poor, dead Amaria.

Jon Snow saw the blond-haired woman ride in, her hair braided down one side of her neck in a practical fashion, her posture on the white stallion impossibly graceful. She wore no armor, but carried herself like a battle maiden and wore a skirt split and fitted with legs for riding. She had a bow strapped to her back and iron-tipped arrows in the quiver. A medallion hung around her neck, similar to the one around his cousin Beckah's. In fact, she resembled Beckah more closely than any of the Lannisters. _So this must be Amaria Lannister's twin_, he thought, bitterly taking in the sight of yet another one of these lions. The Imp's stinging words were still ringing in his ears. The little man's words cut deeply and Jon Snow had certainly had his fill of Lannisters for the night.

Elisabetta noticed the boy as she dismounted. He didn't stare but she felt his eyes upon her. And she would have noticed him even if he had given her no second glance. Those eyes were not so unfamiliar to her. Ned Stark, Howland Reed and Elisabetta Lannister still kept one secret in common. _The bastard, then_, she concluded. She offered him a smile as she was free with her smiles, much like Jamie. And much like Jamie's, they were received with too much suspicion. The bastard boy soon turned away.

Elisabetta undid her bow and removed her riding gloves before entering the banquet hall. She was a woman with little patience for empathy and sentimentality, having lost her mother too early and taking after her father in far too many respects from the beginning. Add to that a dark-of-night errand for her father that she would need to attend to shortly and Elisabetta Lannister had no time for old secrets and lost bastards. Thus, she thought no more on the boy in the courtyard.

Ned Stark stood with his brother talking of rumors quietly. The king laughed and made merry in the middle of the revelry. His wife and Lady Stark made painful small talk at the head table. Jamie was prowling. Tyrion was absent. Elisabetta waited by the doorway, taking in the scene with that half-smile on her lips, the hungry look that had forsworn any sort of satiable appetite. If Jamie seemed eternally prowling, his younger sister was ever on the hunt. He saw her first. She waited for him to come to her.

"Little sister, I didn't think you were coming?" he commented evenly, gauging her expression.

"Father wants you back in Casterly Rock by the end of the year," she stated plainly, before answering his baited words with some of her own, "Full armor, dear brother? Are you not among friends?"

"Had our sister lived, perhaps," Jamie answered dryly, looking around the room for the girl, the blond-haired Stark. There she was, with the eldest Stark boy, embracing her father, the dark-haired ranger. He pointed her out to Elisabetta, "There she is. The resemblance is uncanny, isn't it?"

She might as well have been looking at Amaria…or in a mirror. The thin thread that connected the Lannisters to the Starks was here made flesh.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Author's Note: Minor Change to this chapter - I was headed in one direction but I've decided to go a different way on it - considering a couple comments I've received. I'll end up in the same place either way, I think. So I've taken the "gods" out of it for now. Thanks for reading :) **_

_**II.**_

"Lady Lannister, we did not expect you," Ned Stark regarded the woman coolly. Beckah couldn't take her eyes off the woman. She unconsciously drew nearer to Robb, in his shadow if he had one, if the banquet hall wasn't lit by a thousand candles. The Lannister woman looked just like her. She had seen the resemblance in the Queen's face but this was something else altogether. Here was her likeness exactly, perhaps a little older, but there was no denying that the same blood ran through their veins. And here was her mother's sister. Her mother's _twin. _But oh, to see this woman in the flesh made Beckah nervous. She didn't seem quite real, almost a shade, a wild thing from ancient times. The woman's ice blue eyes met her dark brown ones for only a brief moment before Elisabetta Lannister turned her cool gaze elsewhere.

"My father sends his regards, Lord Stark," she answered with gentility. It was hard to tell if the words were sincere or put upon. She turned back to Beckah, while addressing Benjen, "She has your eyes, Ben. But nothing else."

"She _is_ your sister's daughter," Benjen regarded Beckah warmly and the ice around her soul melted somewhat. Robb's steady hand on her arm helped as well. "Beckah, this is your aunt, Elisabetta."

"My lady," Beckah nearly mumbled the words. Remembering herself, she inclined her head slightly in respect. Elisabetta Lannister watched her niece, amused at the young woman's efforts. She was the daughter of a Northern ranger—my gods, if her hair was arranged and her hands were clean, she was acceptable. But perhaps this graceful deference was Catelyn Stark's influence. After all, the girl had grown up in this house…or maybe it was Beckah's own nature, considering the youngest Stark girl ran around the banquet hall like a wild animal.

Beckah received her aunt's mild scrutiny with an anxious silence. She didn't know what to expect or how to act. Lannisters made her uneasy, despite her blood ties to the entire family. The way this woman seemed to look _through _her was unsettling. Beckah forced herself not to fidget nervously. In the meantime, Elisabetta noted Robb's hand on her niece's bare arm. She addressed the young man directly.

"You live dangerously, my young lord Stark," she said simply. "Do you not know what tricks my niece learned while playing above the wall? I've heard they are powerful indeed."

Elisabetta was being somewhat sly, certainly facetious and just a little bit cruel. It wasn't personal, though Beckah might have taken it that way. She lost no love on anyone really; foe and family alike were beyond her sympathies. Even this girl, this last remnant of the twin she shared a womb with. There was something cold and dark about Elisabetta that was shocking to behold. She had no soul, perhaps that was it. Or at least, she'd hidden it away somewhere, buried in the woods, covered in snow, where no one would ever find it.

Her father appreciated this aspect of her character. He certainly saw it early and fostered it well.

Even as a child, Elisabetta was singled out by her dear father for a purpose that no little girl should be groomed for—all clandestine family business and late night errands. Would Beckah have been the same with a father like Tywin? Elisabetta had not spoken idly. Beckah _had_ learned some unnatural things when she was a child, on those trips she took with her father above the wall. She could use those clever hands of hers for more than baking bread and mending clothes if she chose. At least, that's what the wretches at Castle Black whispered to Elisabetta the last time she'd had occasion to visit that tainted place.

But Elisabetta had yet to see Beckah's rumored talents and she was disappointed at how ordinary the young woman appeared. Perhaps raised here, among Northern men who apparently forwent wits for honor—Elisabetta would roll her eyes to the ceiling at this if she were alone—a Lannister might indeed turn into a Stark. _Ha! _Elisabetta could hear her father's dismissive snort in her head.

"I do," Robb Stark stated flatly, without further comment, regarding the Lannister woman with a steadfast expression that Elisabetta saw rarely. Only brave men gave her that look. And there weren't many brave men left in Westeros. Or the rest of the world, for that matter. His steady gaze dared her to continue in this manner. Elisabetta relented. But only because despite herself, she admired the young man's recklessness in defying a woman who had reduced so many older, stronger, wiser men to blood and bones.

_These Northerners, _Elisabetta shook her head knowingly. _Honorable fools, all of them._


	3. Chapter 3

III.

In his half-drunken slumber, Tyrion felt a fly land on his cheek. He swatted it away, without opening his eyes. The swine he was using as a pillow grunted in its own sleep but didn't stir. The fly returned, damnable thing – without buzzing, without learning its lesson. He swatted at it again. But in vain. Finally, Tyrion opened his eyes to find Elisabetta standing above him, fully dressed and wide awake, left elbow leaning on the rail of the pen, chin held lazily in the hand attached to it. Her right hand was more occupied, clutching a long, brown and black feather that she'd plucked from the stable floor. The feather was near enough his face that he now understood the tenacity and nerve of the "fly" that had been plaguing him. His sister nearly smiled.

"Good morning," she purred casually.

"You look like Cersei when you smile like that," Tyrion muttered. It wasn't a compliment. He squinted against the morning light spilling into the shed that had served as his bedroom last night. He blinked a few times hoping that she'd disappear, a mid-morning apparition brought on by too much wine, and he could roll over and go back to sleep. No such luck. "Don't you sleep?"

"Yes," she answered simply, without elaboration. Her short, femme fatale manner was always irritating but no more so than when he had better things to do. Like sleep off a night of heavy drinking.

"But when?" he grumbled, more to himself than to her. The Lannister siblings all had complicated relationships, that was certain. The unnatural love that bonded the eldest twins contrasted well with the pure hatred that Cersei held for the youngest. And while Jamie and Tyrion approached a brotherly affection, Elisabetta and Cersei had not spoken two words between them in decades. This was not out of resentment or bitterness or jealousy or anything so dramatic. It was merely a product of two sisters who had absolutely no regard for each other. So it was.

But Tyrion and Elisabetta's relationship fell somewhere in between, as they were both monsters in their own way, suffering from physical and moral deformities respectively. Though one fell into their fate and the other, it could be argued, sought it out. Still, Tyrion didn't begrudge Elisabetta her chosen profession, as their father's favorite little assassin. The moral complexities of her soul might be compromised sure but then look at Jamie and Cersei…Tyrion sat up, halfway anyway.

"Are you going to tell me what you want? Or do I have to guess?" he asked. He continued, "Because if you want me to help you murder the entire Stark household or go track down some lesser lord who insulted Father in some absolutely unacceptable way and now, of course, must pay…well, I'm just not up to it this morning. You'll have to find your brawn elsewhere."

"You _are_ amusing, you know," Elisabetta commented lightly, with another one of those infuriating half-smiles. "I don't understand why father gives you such a hard time."

"Have you met Tywin Lannister?" Tyrion asked rhetorically, sardonically and, down deep there somewhere, a little bitterly. Elisabetta just shrugged, having never felt the sting of their father's rejection herself.

"I'm headed to Castle Black," she answered him, finally. "I need a word with the Old Bear and he's certainly not going to come down here to give it to me…you should come with me."

"To Castle Black?…no, I don't believe that's any place that interests me, sister dear. All boys up there and not much variation in the wine, I'd imagine," Tyrion yawned, still squinting at that bright, bright light that was so good at finding every nook and cranny in the place. The sun could go to hell. "I think you have me confused with Benjen Stark. Or maybe that bastard of Ned's."

"They'll be along, of course," Elisabetta replied, nodding. "But I'm leaving this morning. I don't travel well with others."

Tyrion gave a hmm-ing sound of understated agreement.

She continued, "I didn't see you last night and I doubt our paths will cross again for some time"—she gave him the most genuine of her smiles yet—"so I wanted to say hello. And goodbye."

"I'm touched," Tyrion stated flatly.

"No, you're not," Elisabetta replied, with a laugh. "But goodbye in any case, Tyrion. Watch yourself with these wolves."

"Don't worry. My clever tongue will keep me out of trouble," Tyrion fell back on his makeshift pillow, sleep beckoning him back with such sweet, sweet arms. Even with the pigs. Even in the mud. Perhaps especially then. Elisabetta threw the black and brown feather into the pen. It landed on his head and he promptly threw the damn thing into the slop pail at his right side. She left the shed, grinning. He mumbled after her, already halfway to dreamland, "Me go to Castle Black, Elisabetta? At this time in the morning? And you call _me_ amusing."


End file.
